Located in a forest more than 600 miles northwest of Lima, Edificio E is an academic building at the University of Piura, which serves a large number of rural students. Eleven wood-clad volumes, connected by semi-exterior pathways, contain a series of lecture halls and administrative offices, with public spaces interspersed throughout to encourage casual encounters among students.

“The ambiguous, shaded exterior spaces sheltered by the buildings that form the whole were created to provide a place for informal learning and for life in the broadest sense,” the architects said in a statement. “It’s been immensely rewarding to see how students and professors occupy the structure, and to see how it’s created a new centrality on campus, where people stay independently of having classes.”

In July, a jury pared down a list of more than 175 projects to six finalists: Edificio E; Freelon Adjaye Bond and SmithGroupJJR’s Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.; Edwin Chan’s True North housing development in Detroit; PRODUCTORA and Isaac Broid’s Teopanzolco Cultural Center in Cuernavaca, Mexico; Andrade Morettin Arquitetos Associados’ IMS Paulista, a cultural institution in São Paulo; and Paulo Mendes da Rocha and MMBB Arquitetos’ SESC 24 de Maio, a leisure, sports, and medical facility. Barclay & Crousse’s project stood out in particular for its “deceptive simplicity” and “unexpected complexity,” said jury chair Ricky Burdett.

“Like a vernacular village of narrow streets and open spaces—so typical of organic urban models across Latin America—the building compresses the collective human experience,” Burdett said. “A sequence of interconnected ramps, corridors, balconies, and open spaces are hewn out of the orthogonal concrete mass, like crevices and ravines formed in mountain ranges over geological time.” 

Previous winners of the prize include Herzog de Meuron’s 1111 Lincoln Road in Miami, Álvaro Siza’s Iberê Carmago Foundation in Brazil and SANAA’s Grace Farms in Connecticut.